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Pretty cool. BookPulse is a company that offers a Facebook app that adds info about your book to your Facebook page, including buy links, excerpts and quizzes. Now they have taken that Facebook info and put it on a separate website so that it’s easy to see even for people who don’t use Facebook.

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I hope you will visit Jean Henry Mead’s blog at Mysterious Writers and read what we talked about in our interview. We talk about Painted Black, writing, and the next Street Stories novel, Bend Me, Shape Me.

Here’s one of the unique questions I answered:

Which three inanimate objects would you save in case of a fire or other natural disaster?

My laptop, my external hard drive, and my purse. Hopefully I’ve put my wallet in my purse before the fire started. All very practical, I know, and I would truly mourn any personal mementos that were left behind and destroyed but my words could never be rewritten in quite the same way again (I know because I’ve lost files and never could rewrite to my satisfaction again). Plus almost all my pictures are digitized so I’m saving memories as well. And with cash, credit cards and ID available, that would be one less hassle I would have to worry about as I piece my life together.

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Now that I work from home so much, I have a lot of catching up to do when I finally get a chance to talk to a friend. One of the first comments I get from people these days seem to be, “How’s the book doing?”

They’re not asking about the new book I’m working on, they’re asking about Painted Black which was published last December. That much I can usually count on. What I don’t know is how to answer them.

How do you judge how a book is doing? If I answer based on the reviews and feedback I’ve gotten from people, I’d say the book is doing great. The ratings that I’ve gotten have all been four or five stars and almost everyone has mentioned how reading the book has made them think seriously about homelessness. Some have even said they now see homeless people through new eyes.

This, above all, is the measure of success I hope people are asking me about. But if they really just want to know how many copies are sold, that’s where my confusion comes in. In the first place, since I didn’t self publish, I don’t have immediate access to sales numbers. Even my publisher only gets print sales information once a quarter. In the second place, if sales are minimal, wouldn’t telling people that make it sound like Painted Black is not a very good book? How do I even know how many copies sold equals a book’s success or failure?

I can say that Painted Black has not made any best seller lists. It has not made me or the publisher rich. It hasn’t even made me any money yet. Do I wish more people would buy the book? Hell yes! But not so that I can say my book sold xxx,000 copies. I want people to buy the book for the same reason I love to read books: to learn, to enjoy, to be touched by the world within its pages and maybe have their own lives influenced as well.

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I sent off promo packets to some of my hometown news sources, including the columnist Nancy Dinelli-Prill at the News Tribune in LaSalle, Illinois. Nancy recently did an article about all the books people have called to her attention. Here’s what she had to say about Painted Black.

The next book that crossed my desk this week comes from Debra R. Borys of Seattle, Wash. “My mother still lives in my hometown of La Salle, Illinois and recently sent me a clipping from your column in the News Tribune. In it, you invite your readers to send you information about books they have written,” she writes.

It seems that our little “help the author” series we do in AgriNews and the Tribune gets around. Debra goes on to say that her book, “Painted Black” is a suspense novel and is about a reporter, Jo Sullivan and her search for a missing street kid. The story takes place in Chicago. I was really impressed with the “packet” that was sent with lots of information about the book including a disc that could be loaded in your computer as an electronic version. Very impressive. If you are interested the Ebook and the trade paperback are available both on Amazon and Barnes & Noble, iBookstore.com or ordered from any bookstore.

What the Hell?

Chicago, freeze-dried bodies, kids sleeping on the streets. That's what this blog is about. What's what my novel is about. Dark urban graffiti, hard rock music and doing what you gotta do to survive. Small glimpses of the novel mix with snapshots from real life. You tell me which posts are real and which are fiction. If you can.